Submissions Welcome. No Names, Please.

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Matthew D’Abate, 37, tends bar at the Plank, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he also holds a literary group, Literate Sunday, in which writers anonymously submit stories for others to read and comment on, often over a drink or two.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

By Sheila McClear

Sept. 26, 2014

Walk into the Plank, a dim, creatively furnished dive in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on a Sunday around 5 p.m., and the number of patrons quietly reading is surprising. They are bent over their beer-stained pages while sitting at the bar, on nearby chairs and on the patio out back.

From behind the bar, Matthew D’Abate, 37, has an unusual come on: “Do you like short stories?” he asks between mixing drinks.

Mr. D’Abate is the founder of Literate Sunday, a highly inclusive writing workshop, literary social club and email list. Each week, he puts out a new crop of five stories, which are available to read at the Plank during his bartending shift, from 2 to 10 p.m. During those hours, the printed stories come out from a drawer in a low chest in the back of the bar, and are stacked on a nearby desk. The chalkboard out front, on the corner of Bedford Avenue and North Fifth Street, reads, “Literate Sunday/Free Short Stories/Try the Best Bloody Marys Ever/$3 PBR.”

The regulars pick up a piece to read and sit down with their friends. One of the five new stories printed out that week may well have been one that they submitted, and they are eager to see if they received any feedback.

“You’d be so surprised,” Mr. D’Abate said. “People who you’d think would never have any interest — a rough-and-tumble guy, a gangster guy rolling in — it turns out they love short stories.”

The most unexpected aspects of the sessions, however, is that there are no names attached; the stories are all published anonymously. The idea, Mr. D’Abate said, is that the stories he selects could be written by anyone. And they might be, he said, hinting at well-known writers who submit work. But that’s not the point.

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Mr. D’AbateCreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“The point of Literate Sunday is to remove, if not subvert, the idea of fame, removing the ego and the names from the pieces so the stories may speak for themselves,” Mr. D’Abate wrote recently to his email list, which features one of the five stories each week.

He started the group about a year ago with three friends who wanted to share their writing with each other, but anonymously. “It started as a literary game,” he said. “We didn’t want to tell each other whose stories they were.”

The game was a byproduct of the way fiction is often taught in universities. “When I was taking some grad classes, there was such an emphasis on where the writer was from, whether it was a man or a woman, what country they were from,” Mr. D’Abate said, sipping from a can of Rolling Rock on a recent afternoon at Library Bar on the Lower East Side, where he said he wrote much of the novel he has nearly completed.

So he stripped the stories of their names — and with them, the expectations.

For the writers who make up Literate Sunday — new, experienced, professional and hobbyist — Mr. D’Abate’s no-names rule is welcome, even in a field where jockeying for recognition is common.

“There’s this real fear through social media and through the experience of having grown up online of being very conscious of what’s linked to your name,” said Kara Rota, 26, who discovered the email list through a friend about a month ago and has already submitted writing. On the positive side, she said, “I think there’s a real value to be found in doing something creative anonymously that gives you a freedom you don’t have a lot anymore.”

Steve Carlsen, 25, who moved to New York about eight months ago, agreed. “It allows the writing to live dangerously,” he said. He seemed to be among Literate Sunday’s more enthusiastic members. “As soon as I found out about this,” he said, “I went back to the squat I was staying at and submitted my first story a week later.” To protect the idea of anonymity, he declined to say whether one of his pieces had been chosen for distribution.

That’s not to say that curiosity doesn’t break through. “Tell me who wrote this story!” demanded a first-timer, a young woman in yellow, waving a sheaf of paper at Mr. D’Abate on a recent Sunday. He refused.

In most cases, Mr. D’Abate knows the identity of the writers who are submitting works, though some use email addresses with aliases to avoid detection. And while Mr. D’Abate said he would not name Literate Sunday’s better-known members, he could not resist mentioning that authors featured in Literate Sunday have also contributed to publications like The Paris Review, n+1 and McSweeney’s. One member, he says, had a New York Times best-selling book, and another had a book translated into 12 languages. There is, of course, no way to check whether any of that is true, unless the stories eventually get more conventional publication.

Those in the know can also drop in at the Plank at other times to read and comment on the stories; a cache of well over 100 is kept in that chest in the back. Literature fans can select a few pages to read, have a drink or two — maybe even take out a pen and add to the comments and critiques on the back. “It’s very secret,” Mr. D’Abate said, proudly, of the trove of stories. “If you’re a member, you definitely know it’s there. But if you don’t know, you won’t.”

To draw subscribers to the email list, Mr. D’Abate spreads the word mostly via strategically placed business cards that read only, “Literate Sunday. New Stories. New authors. All anonymous,” followed by an email address to contact to receive a new short story every week. Cards might be found tucked into a mirror in an East Village bar bathroom, or slipped between the pages of the used books at the Strand or Housing Works.

“We got people,” Mr. D’Abate said of the bartenders, booksellers and email list members who make up his distribution network; he also hands out plenty himself.

While the Sunday crowd at the Plank skews young, people in their 20s or 30s, the email list (now numbering 500 people in 12 countries) is broader, ranging “from students to creative-writing professors, from my 15-year-old cousin to seniors in Providence, Rhode Island,” Mr. D’Abate said.

He said his goal was to democratize what has often been a clubby, rarefied form of literature.

“There is a higher purpose,” Mr. D’Abate said. “It is about the writer being free. It is about not being chained by money or expectations or what school you came from. All the greats have always come from outside the system.”

A freelance writer, Danny Bellini, 26, put it more simply: “If you have a famous author’s short story in your right hand and a local author’s story in your left, you’re going to read the one on the right. But if you don’t know which is which? It puts everyone on even ground.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB4 of the New York edition with the headline: Submissions Welcome. No Names, Please.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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